Vegan Battle: Cream Cheese!

CREAM CHEESE. It’s a good snack on crackers, tasty on a sandwich, and dynamite in veggie sushi. Let’s get ready for the vegan cream cheese battle! I’ve got 3 brands: Daiya Chive and Onion Cream Cheese Style Spread, Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese, Go Veggie! Classic Plain Creamy Spread. All 3 seem fairly similar calorie-wise. For 30g (2 tbsp) both the Go Veggie! and the Daiya are 90 calories. The Tofutti is slightly less at 60 calories. Fats: Go Veggie! has 9g (5g saturated, 0g trans), Tofutti has 5g (2g saturated, 2g trans), and the Daiya has 7g (4g saturated, 0g trans). They all contain around the same amount of protein (1g) and no iron. Daiya has almost twice as much sodium with 220g (Go Veggie! and Tofutti both have 120mg). They don’t contain any other vitamins.

Texture-wise, they are all pretty close, though the Go Veggie! seems the closest to actual cream cheese. In the picture above we have Daiya on the top left, Go Veggie in the foreground and Tofutti on the top right.

The crackers I used are Monkey Toast brand, a great vegan cracker made about as locally as possible; down the street from my Mom’s house in Horseshoe Bay. The packaging is adorable and the apple cinnamon flavour is super tasty. I highly recommend them!

Packaging for the Daiya brand is nice, it’s an atypical shape/size which looks more modern than the simple circular container.

Go Veggie! and Tofutti are both fairly similar. I like the Tofutti’s packaging least as it has a lot of writing on the top, and I prefer cleaner and easier to read branding.

Taste-wise the Daiya has the same tangy taste as their shredded mozza, which I have noted before I’m not a huge fan of. So I liked the Daiya cream cheese the least. I have eaten the Tofutti brand a lot and it’s pretty close to real cream cheese, though the texture is just a little bit smoother/gelatinous. But only slightly. The Go Veggie! has a very mild and pleasant taste, and the texture is not too creamy or gelatinous. Overall I liked the taste and the texture of the Go Veggie! the best, though it’s a close second for Tofutti.